Ahmed Fouad Negm, Dissident Poet of Egypt’s Underclass, Dies at 84

Ahmed Fouad Negm in 2006, outside his home in Cairo.Credit
Mohamed Al-Sehety/Associated Press

CAIRO — Ahmed Fouad Negm, an Egyptian poet whose irreverent writing, forged by poverty and prison, lacerated Egypt’s strongmen, gave voice to its underclass and inspired its dissidents, died on Tuesday at his home here. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by Sayed Enaba, a longtime friend.

Over four decades, Mr. Negm (pronounced NEG-em) wrote verse in colloquial Arabic that channeled the privations and grim humor that were part of working-class life. His fearless and often mocking critiques of power made him a folk hero, but also earned him a total of 18 years in jail.

With little recognition from the establishment except as derision — President Anwar el-Sadat once called him “the obscene poet” — Mr. Negm’s reputation as a counterculture poet grew in the poor neighborhoods where he lived and among students, leftists and others who passed around his writings or tapes of his performances.

His personality was as diverting as his poems: He cursed and teased, extolled the virtues of hashish and boasted about his many marriages. On a wall of his home he painted a line of poetry: “Glory to the crazy people in this dull life.”

Mr. Negm’s work, which owed debts to earlier Egyptian vernacular poets and to leftist authors, both chronicled the country’s modern history and served as an accompaniment to its struggles. Young activists mined his poems for inspiration and transformed them into chants of protest.

His words echoed across Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak “as if they were specifically written for that moment,” his friend Mr. Enaba said. Lines from his poem “Who Are They, and Who Are We?” became a chanted slogan in the square, marking Egypt’s perennial struggles and sharpening the lines of the battle at hand.

They were “the sultans,” and the people were “the war: its kindling, its fire,” the poem read.

“They wear the latest fashions,” the protesters shouted, “and we live seven to a room.”

Mr. Negm started writing in the late 1950s, during a three-year prison sentence on a forgery charge. After he was released in 1962, he published his first book, “Images From Life and Prison.”

In the 1960s he teamed up with Sheikh Imam Eissa, a composer and oud player, who put music to Mr. Negm’s verse. Their collaboration made both men famous and established them among Egypt’s foremost dissidents. They were roommates for a spell, and were locked up together, too. The partnership lasted for more than 20 years.

One composition, which criticized President Gamal Abdel Nasser after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, landed Mr. Negm and Sheikh Imam in jail. Sadat, who succeeded Nasser as president, released them, but sent Mr. Negm back to prison a few years later for mocking his speaking style.

In Mr. Negm’s poems, Mr. Antoon said, “the aesthetic and the political went hand in hand.”

Egypt’s chronic inequality and decades of political stasis gave Mr. Negm’s work a timeless quality. Words he wrote in 1967, about official attempts to pacify ordinary Egyptians, never lost their resonance:

Don’t tire your brain

in the work of politics

mind your own business

with vim and vigor

Ahmed Fouad Negm was born on May 22, 1929, in the village of Kafr Abu Negm, north of Cairo. His father, a police officer, died when he was 6, and his mother, unable to provide for Mr. Negm and his siblings, placed him in an orphanage in the city of Zagazig.

After leaving the orphanage, he worked as a laborer on a British military base, as a farmhand and as a street vendor before his first imprisonment, in 1959.

Mr. Negm was married at least five times and as many as eight; friends who had known him for decades were not sure. In 1972, he married the journalist and literary critic Safinaz Kazem. Their daughter, Nawara Negm, is a prominent Egyptian activist. In addition to her and his last wife, Omaima Abdel-Wahab, survivors include two other daughters, Afaf and Zeinab Negm.

A few days before he died, with Egypt once again mired in civil conflict and tilting toward authoritarian rule, Mr. Negm fretted about the country’s path.

But his beloved revolutionaries were still in the streets. “The youth we have are devils,” he said affectionately. “Nobody can fool them.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 9, 2013, on Page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Ahmed Fouad Negm, Dissident Poet Of Egypt’s Underclass, Dies at 84. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe